Us Whole: An Abolition of Hip-Hop Sound

• In Event: Loving Wholeness Together, With Grief: A Listening Session With Liner Notes

Abstract

This presentation/demonstration is organized around an academic audio and performance paper produced as part of a participatory research project about how Black and Indigenous creative collectives evolve to sustain themselves over time. As a scholarly genre, the audio paper is a performative format that embraces affect, experimentation, and sonic aesthetics (Groth & Samson, 2016). Audio papers are not scholarly papers simply read aloud ala an audio book. Rather, performative aesthetics, sound technology mediation, and idiosyncrasies play into argumentation.

The objective/purpose of this specific presentation/performance is to use sound as a conceptual resource (Stern, 2012) for thinking about collective formation outside state-sponsored institutions through the audio paper genre. The theoretical and strategic frameworks for this task come from traditions of Black study (Harney & Moten, 2013) and anticolonial performance studies around notions of form, formlessness, and abolition (Ruiz & Vormulous, 2021). From this standpoint, formlessness does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged in the in-between of minor aesthetic performances. In this case, the minor aesthetic performance takes place through the audio paper. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity, and "assembly of our obligations to one another" (Ruiz & Vormulous, 2021, p. 8).

The methods and modes of inquiry come from re-presentational approaches to sounding and sonic composition (Henriques, 2011; Weheliye, 2005). In this approach, sounds are not representations of experiences and events, as often assumed of song lyrics. Rather, sound – as a material phenomenon of vibration and disruption – is a re-presentation of a product that has been already processed. Characteristic of hip-hop sonic practice, this re-presentation happens through ruptures, layers, and flows (Rose, 1994)

The data sources and materials for this audio paper come from a shared archive of sonic material for the not-yet (van Hesswijk et al. 2021) co-gathering during this participatory research project about Black and Indigenous creative collectives. Specifically, the audio paper is composed with conversation recordings totaling over 20 hours and original sounds composed with synthesizers in Ableton Live, a digital audio workstation. The results/conclusions presented in the audio paper is a series of borderless vignettes where voices and sounds converge, dissolve, pulse, and rupture in loving demand for the wholeness we will only find among one another.

The scholarly significance of this demonstration lies in two areas. First, the presentation/performance brings a novel, experimental scholarly format in the audio paper to bear on education scholarship, a move that is certainly long overdue. Second, the performance asserts the material presence of hip-hop sound, not simply its presence as representation or lyrics.

Author

• Emery Marc Petchauer, Teachers College, Columbia University